Fire at Indian Army's ammunition dumps

Spontaneous combustion is not a happy phenomenon for a location that houses a few hundred tonnes of explosives, but the Indian Army's ammunition dumps have fallen into a disconcerting pattern of just lighting up.

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December 31, 2001

ISSUE DATE: December 31, 2001

UPDATED: September 18, 2012 15:22 IST

Staying Alive: Children play with the remains of a shell

Pathankot: Spontaneous combustion is not a happy phenomenon for a location that houses a few hundred tonnes of explosives, but the Indian Army's ammunition dumps have fallen into a disconcerting pattern of just lighting up.

In one particularly inflammable four weeks, three of them caught fire between April 29 and June 3, 2001. In Pathankot, 427 tonnes of shells worth Rs 20 crore blew up. A month later it was Birdhwal in Rajasthan. Then on June 3 the dump at Rohtak in Haryana caught fire. Neglected storage facilities is the most obvious cause.

Sixty per cent of the army's ammunition is stored in the open, and even simple precautions like not letting the grass grow around the perimeter are often forgotten.

A CAG report has described the ammunition supply chain as being of "Second World War" vintage.

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